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[req]NeXTstep

I just got a nextstation and the person I got it from wasn't sure if it had the system or not it was in a school and it starts up and searches for a network. any version would be nice next or openstep. thanks!

i have a mac and i might have hat image but this system doesnt have a cd drive and I dont have a scsi drive at the present so anything that is burnable to floppies would be best its also an original so it doesnt support color so 2.2 or 3 would work better i think

The good news is that you're covered by the terms of the Licensing Agreements to legally install and use any release of NEXTSTEP or OPENSTEP up to version 4.2 on your NeXTstation. Rob Blessin at Black Hole, Inc. has (informal) permission from Apple to distribute NEXTSTEP to existing black hardware owners.

You are right about NEXTSTEP 3 being a better match for the black hardware. OPENSTEP is quite a bit more memory-hungry and while it will run on your NeXTstation, it will feel sluggish.

The bad news is that you are going to have a very difficult time installing the software without a CD-ROM drive. None of the releases were available on floppy disk, to the best of my recollection. Your only choices were MO (not helpful unless you have a cube, and anyway I think I had the last working NeXST MO drive in the world), or CD.

One possibility if you have access to another working NeXT, is that you can use BuildDisk.app to install a clean system onto a blank SCSI hard drive, and then install that drive into your NeXTstation.

I'd be happy to do what I can to help you out with this, but you're probably going to have to find either another local NeXT owner who'll let you borrow his machine long enough to do a BuildDisk, or find a SCSI CD-ROM, before you get very much farther with this project.

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Something to try, though, in the meanwhile... assuming your NeXTstation is searching the network for a master NetInfo server (for account and other administrative information) and not a boot server, you stand a good chance of being able to recover the NetInfo data back to a standalone (i.e. out-of-the-box) configuration.

1. Turn on your NeXTstation.

2. As soon as you see "Loading From Disk" on the screen, hold both "Command" keys while pressing the '~' key (it's at the top left of the numeric keypad -- if you have an ADB keyboard, it's the command bar plus the key at the top left of the numeric keypad, whatever it might be labelled). This drops you into the ROM monitor.

3. At the "NeXT>" prompt, type "b sd -s" to boot from the first SCSI disk, into single-user mode. This gives you a root prompt without having to know the password.

When the machine comes up, you'll automatically be logged in as the user 'me'. Set a password on this account to prevent the automatic login from happening, if you like. The root password will be blank, and the system will be ready to reconfigure for your network. If you get the "searching for NetInfo" dialog during boot, just press "c" to continue booting, everything will still work.

You'll want to run SimpleNetworkStarter.app to finish reconfiguring network stuff.

Ill have to try that next time i get a chance b/c whenever i even get a chance to look at it I get caught up in something else. Im not really sure about the memory it has a full bank but theyre unlabeled so im not sure if it was upgraded. I think there is a chance of recovering something on it, t was in a school and from my experience they usually just boot from a server ut they leave any system that was their alone. i belive that if there is a system its 2.2 as this is the B&W model.
Ive been searching ebay for a scsi cd drive but again havent had a lot of time. What exactly is an MO drive Ive never heard of it. there is also no keyboard or mouse so unless i find my serial to usb adapter im stuck
Thanks for the info its very helpful was I can collect all the missing pieces

It is a magneto-optical drive for removable discs, mostly used in professional environments because they are very reliable as far as I know, usually connected by SCSI and the media is available in capacities up to 2.3GB. The media looks a bit like a small CD in a case. More info here.

In the case of the MO drive in the NeXT cube, it uses a custom interface on a 20-pin IDC cable, and is only compatible with non-Turbo NeXT cubes. No one I am aware of has ever found a different MO drive capable of reading the media format, though it is physically compatible with many other drives.

Also, while the media is certainly highly reliable, and many other MO drives are also reasonably reliable, the NeXT MO drive is famous for its high failure rate.

The original justification for MO was to provide high-capacity removable, rewritable, random-access media. CD-R was not yet commercially viable; Bernoulli and Syquest had only managed to achieve 40 to 80 MB per cartridge with their 5.25" removable cartridge drives by this time, at a higher cost per disk. The NeXT MO stored four to five times as much data, and could be used double-sided to achieve an even higher capacity per cartridge. The drives, however, were significantly more expensive than the Bernoulli or Syquest RCDs. Jerry Pournelle frequently bragged about having one in his "Chaos Manor" columns.

Even CD-ROM hadn't really achieved any significant market penetration at this time.

Trivia: the CD caddies used by old CD-ROM drives are based mechanically on the 5.25" MO cartridge, so that transport mechanisms which had already been developed for MO drives could be reused, thus cutting costs associated with developing computer CD-ROM drives for the mass market.

did the drives fail because of time or use and werent they manufactured by canon? I guess if I found a serial mo drive that would probably work. What did the turbo cubes have if not mo? Cd i would guess and did next ever release their own external cd drive for nextstations? Sorry for all the questions but I like to know what im getting myself into

Many of the drives failed from dust contamination and the resultant overheating. Mine worked when I put it in storage five years ago, then didn't when I brought it back out again a couple weeks ago. Other people had similar experiences, buying brand new replacement drives, and unpacking them to find they didn't work, or then would fail within a couple weeks.

The drive is a Canon OMD-1, made specially for NeXT.

Jobs' idea for the MO drive in the NeXT was to enable a user to sit down at any NeXT machine, boot it with his own MO disk, and then that NeXT machine would be indistinguishable from his own, as all the software and customizations would be present on that MO disk (or on a network-accessible shared resource), and there would be no persistent storage in the NeXT itself.

In practice, with the Canon MO drive having a write cycle four times longer than its read cycle time, virtual memory paging to the MO was something very, very painful. As the first NeXT machines came with a relatively small amount of memory (4 to 8 MB) the slow paging caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth. As an aside, Sun users made the same discovery, independently, and around the same time, concerning Sun's master plan of having diskless, netbooted UNIX workstations; in Sun's case it was the necessity of having a swap device on the wrong end of an overloaded 10base ethernet segment.

At any rate, NeXT quickly offered an "accellerator", which was nothing more than a 40 MB SCSI drive to put the swap file on. Before much longer, hard drives of the required size started to reach prices which were attractive enough, and CD-ROM really took off in the mass market. NeXT were forced to adapt or perish. Wisely, they chose to adapt.

Turbo cubes had hard drives and optionally a 2.8 MB 3.5" floppy, just like the NeXTstations.

NeXT did offer a 2x external SCSI CD-ROM drive, but it was a Sony OEM unit with nothing special about it apart from black paint and a NeXT logo on the front. Many other vendors offered the very same drive with their own paint and logos. There's no need for you to get the NeXT drive, and in fact I would not as collectors have gone nuts over them and you'll be very luck to find one for less than $75. The same drive with an Apple logo up front you could probably find somebody who would pay you $5 to take! Pretty much any external SCSI CD-ROM drive will work, though, and 2x is not very fast, so even the Apple drive route isn't the best one you could take.

im not crazy but i do like when in all places i can have the original equipment. I did some reading and found the very first version of NextStep was .8 and the last was 4.0(never released to general public but there is a beta) there were also a few alphas along the way. .8 and .9 were shipped with the very first machines that were sent to colleges and universities. Though I doubt any thing is left of those as Im not sure the discs ever left NeXT

I have a lot of early releases on MO disk, including 0.8, 0.9, 1.0, and 1.0a. They all only run on the original 68030 cube machines.

The first release of NEXTSTEP to run on the '040 machines (such as your NeXTstation) is 2.0. The first version to be released on CD-ROM was 3.0.

Version 3.3 was the end of the line for NEXTSTEP, proper. After that NeXT did another "evolve or die" and released OPENSTEP 4.0. OPENSTEP itself was a nothing more than a collection of the object-oriented APIs from NEXTSTEP which were evolved into something operating system agnostic; it was delivered for Windows NT (as "OPENSTEP Enterprise"), and for Solaris. It was also delivered as "OPENSTEP for Mach", which was the OPENSTEP API deployed on a somewhat updated version of the Mach/BSD core from NEXTSTEP 3, and can reasonably be considered to be NEXTSTEP version 4.

The end of the line for OPENSTEP for Solaris was version 1.1. It was roughly equivalent to OPENSTEP 4.0 for Mach (or NT) plus some minor updates.

The end of the line for OPENSTEP for Mach and for Windows NT was 4.2, which was released by Apple in 1998.

Rhapsody considers itself to be something spiritually related to what would've been OPENSTEP 5.

Was there much change between the preview releases and the first public version ive never seen any pics of it? and there was a Nextstep v4 not openstep there are even pictures showing it had a completely different gui.

Would there be any way you could upload the preview releases,please?I think it be interesting to see if it was possible to run it on the nextstation and if not run it under emulation.

There was not much change, visually, between the earliest releases and the last. The APIs and development tools underwent a very dramatic maturation, not only at the beginning, but throughout its entire development history. I am not sure this is what you had in mind.

I am curious where you found the reference to a NEXTSTEP version 4 with a completely different GUI. I was a NeXT user for nearly ten years and am pretty familiar with the history. This is the first time I've heard of such a thing. If you can share a pointer to your information, I'd be grateful.

NEXTSTEP prior to 2.0 won't run on your NeXTstation. It'll crash very early in the boot process. You'll have to trust me on this one.

Emulation is a different story. While I've not heard of there being a NeXT emulator currently in development, it seems these days anything is possible. The problem is that my copies of early NEXTSTEP are all on MO disk. My MO drive is not working anymore, so I have no way to read them. I will certainly let you know if that situation changes.

The floppies I am aware of for 3.3 are only boot floppies for the install CD-ROM. They do not contain any more code than simply a standalone loader so that a miniroot install environment can be loaded from CD-ROM.

As we've demonstrated, though, knowing a lot about something is totally different from knowing everything about it. The 4.0 beta was news to me. (I actually found the site at shawcomputing.net right after I wrote my last reply on this topic.) I was there and I was connected, I'm not sure how I missed the rumors at the time!